There’s an implication from how we treat “history” that implies a break between past and present. Perhaps I’m alone in this, but when significant events happened in my grade school years and someone mentioned they’d be “in the history books one day,” the thought gave me a feeling like that of descending a staircase and expecting one more step at the bottom. Of course history would continue to be written. I could understand that. But at the same time, it felt oddly wrong.
This plagues us more than we realize, I think, this intuitive perception of a nonexistent moat between us and the past. We know, in a lot of ways, the fallacy here, but we don’t recognize its breadth or its depth. What does it really mean that humanity has only existed for 0.007% of the earth’s history? What does it mean that the United States has only existed for 0.08% of human history? If the implication of evolution is that most species die out or transform into something more adapted to their environments, what does that mean for us, we with the audacity to believe ourselves made in the image of God?
We live in a time, we tell ourselves, of immense change. This is entirely true. Visibly, our planet has changed more in this last 0.007% of its life than for eons beforehand. We, humans, have interacted with resources around us in a fundamentally different way from the species that preceded us and those that are our cohabitants on this earth. We have transformed the earth into buildings and roads and tennis rackets and nuclear bombs. We have created computers, and with them altogether different forms of living. We have created medicine on a scale incomprehensible to even ourselves, just a few hundred years in the past.
At the same time, though, nothing is really changing, because change has always been the case. At least, in our lifetimes. There are others who’ve actually studied these things, so I’ll say this with some deference to them, but I’m not sure the industrial revolution ever really ended, and there’s a piece of me that asks whether it even ever started in the first place. Yes, change accelerated with the steam engine, and again with the computer, and again with the internet, and with every invention around those and in between. But change has always been accelerating, has it not been? If this universe began with a big bang, sending particles and dust hurtling outwards into reaches of nothingness, and if our particular collection of particles and dust collected themselves into this planet, and if the right combination of elements and electricity and pressure and temperature could create proteins in the sea, proteins that multiplied, ever faster and faster, becoming plants and mushrooms and bacteria and animals, and if a particular subset of those animals began to learn to take these elements and these electricities and turn them into large, non-living things, larger and larger and ever the larger…
Has not the change always gotten faster?
Economists and anthropologists and physicists and biologists and so, so many more have better fluency in this arena than I. But it seems there are two explanations of the rapidity of change. One is that, yes, things are changing now faster than they have ever changed before. The other is that things are exactly as they’ve been, that this change is constant, that everything in the world is more or less changing at the same relevant pace, because in every time, things have been changing then faster than they had ever changed before. The latter of these is invalidating. The former gives us an illegitimate sense of stability. The truth, we’d like to say, is somewhere in between, but it’s probably closer to each edge—to both edges—than feels comfortable to admit. It’s not just the industrial revolution that’s ongoing. It’s the big bang. It’s time itself.
What, then, do we do with this? Hell if I know. But there’s something comforting in the twin knowledges that yes, our era is uniquely malleable, and simultaneously that we are in a moment identical in so many ways to so many moments in the past—our past, the world’s past, the universe’s past. There may never be “stability” in the form we crave it, and in the form we try to assign to our current days. But there’s a stability in the timelessness of that reality. We are experiencing things our forebears could never have envisioned. The same was true for them too. They made it through, or they didn’t, and either way, it eventually ended. The same will be true of us, and of our species, and of, again, time itself, somehow. Maybe that’s why there’s that wall, in our minds, between ourselves and history: Because the phenomenon of time and what it brings necessitates a tether to the present. The present is, in some sense, all we ever have.
